Huawei Pitching Open Platform Paradigm To Partners

Networking and telecommunications hardware behemoth Huawei might not be a household name yet, but the Chinese company is looking to become a major player in the cloud computing segment within a few years.

We caught up with William Dong and Mario Fan, President of IT Solution Sales (Enterprise Busienss Group) and Head of Enterprise Business (Western Europe) respectively at the Cloud Computing World Forum earlier today to discuss Huawei's expectations and hopes.

The firm, which was founded only in 1988, is the world's second largest supplier of mobile telecommunications infrastructure equipment and wants to emulate this performance in what is seen by Huawei as being a red hot market.

After recently undergoing a major overhaul, Huawei split its business into four entities: Enterprise, Carriers, Terminal and Others. Earlier this year when we interviewed the company's VP of Marketing and Branding, Fujun, at CeBIT, it was clear that Huawei wanted to move away from being a mere provider of communication hardware and dip its toes into the more lucrative market of providing added end-to-end services.

Putting cloud computing services at the centre of their ICT strategy, our interlocutors were adamant that Huawei's long term relationships with carriers and other operators (the company serves 45 of the world's 50 largest telcos) as well as its commitment to providing an "open platform to all partners" will be key to its ambitions.

Fan also revealed that nine per cent of its workforce, or around 10,000 employees, are currently working on the enterprise business; by 2015, Huawei expects to rake in up to $20 billion from enterprise activities globally.

Dong also presented us with Huawei's vision of SingleCloud, a three-tier platfom (virtualisation platform, hardware architecture and cloud software platform) that advocates open standards and interoperability in a platform-agnostic ecosystem.